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MZ · Mozambique · –

Marrupa fire, 25 August 2026 Marrupa

Out · last detection 7 Sept 2026, 10:53 UTC

The fire started on 25 August 2026 in Marrupa, Mozambique, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,078 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 530 in Mozambique in 2026, of 555.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
3,078ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
25 Aug 2026 – 7 Sept 2026
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
25 Aug
2026
Heat detections
50
in a single hotspot: 52 MW
Danger at start
31
High · FWI index
Average daily power
87MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Aug7 Sept
7 Sept 2026

How it evolved, day by day

31 Aug 2026 · 61 MW · 3 2 Sept 2026 · 398 MW · 29 3 Sept 2026 · 3 MW · 3 4 Sept 2026 · 23 MW · 7 6 Sept 2026 · 16 MW · 4 7 Sept 2026 · 21 MW · 4
2 Sept 6 Sept

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

32°high
39km/h · peak gust
25%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

69% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 390 ha in 2016, 138 ha in 2018, 128 ha in 2019, 287 ha in 2021, 1,092 ha in 2022, 147 ha in 2024, 394 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,120 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.9% of the area of London (31 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Marrupa where it started
    3,094 ha reached on 31 Aug
    0.2 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Started with 60 days without rain: 12 % of the area in Mozambique

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
25 Aug 30.1 °C 36 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
26 Aug 29.6 °C 38 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
27 Aug 28.9 °C 38 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
28 Aug 30.3 °C 30 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
29 Aug 29.1 °C 33 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
30 Aug 29.6 °C 38 % 31 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
31 Aug 31.1 °C 31 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
1 Sept 31.7 °C 25 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
2 Sept 30.6 °C 27 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
3 Sept 30.7 °C 28 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
4 Sept 30.7 °C 34 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
5 Sept 27.8 °C 44 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
6 Sept 31.2 °C 33 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
7 Sept 31.3 °C 29 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
8 Sept after 28.6 °C 36 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
9 Sept after 28.1 °C 39 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
10 Sept after 30.9 °C 35 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
11 Sept after 31.8 °C 31 % 28 km/h 0.1 mm High 33
12 Sept after 31.1 °C 31 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
13 Sept after 31.1 °C 32 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
14 Sept after 30.5 °C 31 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
15 Sept after 32.0 °C 28 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
16 Sept after 29.3 °C 33 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
17 Sept after 30.3 °C 35 % 35 km/h 0.2 mm High 35

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 18 Aug 2026
After · 14 Sept 2026

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 4 September 2026 the air beside the fire reached 46 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 24: 1.6 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak46 µg/m³
Days over the guideline5 days
PM1047 µg/m³
Optical depth0.75
29 Aug1 Sept4 Sept7 Sept10 Sept
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 50Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Mozambique

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Marrupa fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 25 August 2026 to 7 September 2026 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 31 August 2026 to 7 September 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 3,078 hectares (30.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Marrupa (3,094 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.7 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Mozambique (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 31 August 2026 → 25 August 2026.

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 31 August 2026 to 7 September 2026. 50 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.